Time Management Tips for 2020
How much is your day worth?
What about your hour?
Minute? Second?
Most people will immediately think about their job, and the rate their job is worth. “Well John, I can service two customers an hour, and they pay me $100 each. So my hour is worth $200.”
But that’s not YOUR hour. That’s your Company’s hour.
What your hour can be:
- Learning, leading you to offer higher-value products or services to your customers, increasing the amount you can earn per hour.
- Exercising, causing your blood to flow and health to increase, making you more alert and focused minute by minute and hour by hour.
- Targeted networking, leading you to build relationships that take your entire business or even life in a new, better direction.
- Prospecting, searching for and connecting with your target market.
- Content creation, allowing the world to see your thoughts and value and interact with you.
Your hour can ALSO be:
- Seeing the latest episode of Stranger Things on Netflix.
- Scrolling through your Facebook feed, liking and commenting on your friend’s photos.
- Arguing with friends/family about politics.
So what is your hour worth? I guess it really depends.
INHERENTLY, without considering anything else, your hour is priceless. Your hour also has the same inherent value as everyone else’s. After all, we all have 60 minutes an hour last time I checked.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, earns $4,475,885 an HOUR.
Go ahead, take a deep breath, step out for a while, get some air, then come back.
I repeat: Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, earns $4,475,885 an HOUR.
So, INHERENTLY, your hour is priceless. But in REALITY, your hour might be worthless.
Not only is it worthless, it can actually be negative.
Lesson In Time
My grandfather inherited over $100,000 when he was still alive. Now keep in mind, this was back in the 1970’s. So, by today’s terms, he basically inherited over $600,000. Not millions, but nothing to sneeze at. Money is nothing but options. The option he chose was to place it all in the stock market. And he lost it. Then he borrowed money to try to win it back and lost some more. He had to work like an animal to pay back the bank as well as friends/family, smoked like a chimney due to all the stress, and died way too young from a stroke.
My grandfather didn’t achieve his dreams of being mega-wealthy. But let’s dig deeper.
His decisions had a ripple effect throughout our entire family and through time. We might have been in a very different place had he just tweaked two or three key decisions he made.
The lesson I take from my grandfather is this: Our decisions every single day cause a ripple effect through the ages.
So that day you spent binge watching Netflix all day…
It didn’t go away. That day will affect every single day that comes after it.
Don’t regret it, but use it as a lesson to change.
And again, like with my grandfather, his decisions not only affected him, but everyone around him. When you think of it like that, we have a great responsibility to make good decisions, each and every day.
Be Selfish With Your Time
Your time is the most important resource you have. If you think about it, life is nothing but time. Time on Earth. “How much TIME does he have?” “I wish I had more TIME”.
So why do we waste it every day so thoughtlessly?
This is probably the most perplexing question about humanity I’ve been faced with. I attribute this mainly to people having a short-term view over a long-term view of time.
“It’s just an hour”. Well, if you had Bezos’ hour, you wouldn’t be so careless with it!
Funny enough, we are so willing to be selfish with our MONEY, but not with our TIME.
If you want to change your life and grow your business in a big way, you need to guard your time with your life. Money comes and goes; time just goes. We should lose it when Facebook asks us for an hour of our time, and scoff at a $1,000 expense…not the other way around.
Identify Your Time Thieves
Where are people WASTING their time? A few obvious ones include:
- Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Messenger)
- Streaming Media (Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video)
- Ad-infested “news” articles
Now, everyone has their own unique “Time Thieves”. Identify yours and exterminate them like cockroaches. Take out the Raid and start spraying. They’re bad for you, they don’t care about you, and they just want your time so they can make money.
I’ll leave you with these three tips to beat your Time Thieves:
Avoid
Out of sight, out of mind. If your Time Thieves or biggest distractions are not in your immediate vicinity, it will be that much harder for them to distract you.
Establish
You need to establish a system that maximizes your productivity and minimizes distractions. Make sure you TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS FOR NON-KEY APPS. By default, every app on your phone has notifications set to on. Turn them OFF. Seriously, do it right now. Do you need to know every single time you get a Like? A Comment? Or can you schedule 10 minutes a day or week to manually check these things? It may seem small, but these notifications add up to hours of our time wasted every DAY.
Also, use Bookmarks on your web browser to minimize the time you use to search for things. You probably use the same 5-15 websites over and over again. Set up bookmarks to take you exactly to where you need to go, so you don’t get distracted by non-key information.
Finally, take apps off your phone altogether that are purely distractions. If they aren’t key to your day’s success, delete them.
Monitor
Time Thieves are typically companies, and companies need to make money. So they will constantly try to find their way to your eyes, ears, and thoughts. At least once a month, do a check of your distraction-free system. You find notifications somehow got reactivated and deleted apps re-downloaded. Take them off, and carry on toward achieving your goals.
Don’t let external forces waste your time. Your time is the most precious resource you have. Time is the key, sitting right under your nose, to unlocking success.
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